1. Jane Carroll Dornacker was an American rock musician, comedian and traffic reporter.
25 Facts About Jane Dornacker
1. 2.
Jane Dornacker gained fame as an associate songwriter for the San Francisco rock band The Tubes; she led her own band, Leila and the Snakes.
3.
Jane Dornacker's family lived at 1701 Las Lomas Road, NE Albuquerque, in a house built in 1928 by her grandfather, Dr Edward C Matthews, a physician.
4.
Jane Dornacker was a performer from a young age, and wrote a six-act play while she was in Monte Vista Elementary School; at 8, she sang all the parts in an opera of her own composition "in a language no one could understand".
5.
In 1965 Jane Dornacker moved to San Francisco and in the same year vied to become San Francisco State University's Homecoming Queen.
6.
Jane Dornacker's campaign saw her riding a bicycle enclosed in a cage; she described herself as an 'Earth Mother' and declared that she was magic.
7.
Jane Dornacker did not pursue her college degree beyond this first year.
8.
Jane Dornacker married Bob Knickerbocker, whom she had met at university, and their daughter Naomi was born in 1969.
9.
Jane Dornacker came to the attention of Bill Spooner of The Tubes when he came to see Leila and the Snakes, and he asked her to be a part of the group's live show.
10.
Jane Dornacker co-wrote the song "Don't Touch Me There" for the group with the ceramicist and musician Ron Nagle.
11.
Jane Dornacker built on her early experience as an actress throughout her career, notably in works by Sam Shepard including the 1977 jazz opera Inacoma at San Francisco's Magic Theatre.
12.
Jane Dornacker was featured in, and created, other works for the Overtone Theater including Jane Door and the Five or Four Children, which was staged in October 1980 alongside work by two men who were important to her career: Shepard, creator of a "percussion event", and Wes "Scoop" Nisker's The Last News Show.
13.
Jane Dornacker appeared in The Stand-Up, Anita Sperm and as Nurse Murch in the film The Right Stuff, which had Shepard in the cast.
14.
Jane Dornacker developed a career as a stand-up comic in San Francisco.
15.
Jane Dornacker gained some success in stand-up and was a notable comedian in San Francisco in the early 1980s.
16.
Jane Dornacker cohosted a television show with Wes "Scoop" Nisker, Video West, on channel 26 on Wednesday and Saturday nights in 1979.
17.
Jane Dornacker was initially employed in this role by KFRC, a popular Top 40 radio station.
18.
Jane Dornacker worked with Don Rose, who was that station's morning disc jockey at the time.
19.
Jane Dornacker was noted for her exceptionally fast speech, so fast it required concentration to understand her.
20.
Jane Dornacker was aboard during two unrelated crashes of the helicopters leased to WNBC Radio, approximately six months apart.
21.
Jane Dornacker survived the first crash, on April 18,1986, but was killed in the second.
22.
On October 22,1986, Jane Dornacker was giving one of the station's N-Copter traffic reports during the Joey Reynolds Show on WNBC in New York City.
23.
Jane Dornacker died on her way to Saint Vincent's Catholic Medical Center.
24.
WNBC played other interviews with friends and recordings of Jane Dornacker talking about the first helicopter crash earlier that same year.
25.
Jane Dornacker's music was played during these tribute shows, including "Don't Touch Me There", which she had co-written for The Tubes.